Yesterday, we launched the Axosoft Community Site.  With over 50,000 users worldwide and rapidly growing, the OnTime user community is a sophisticated group of individuals who are some of the best software developers, testers and project managers in the world.  For the past 4 years, our only offering to this community has been a user forum where both users and Axosoft employees participate in some lively conversations about the OnTime product line.  But we wanted to kick things up a notch and offer our users the best possible community experience where they can participate in shaping Axosoft's future products and offer their expertise to their counterparts in other parts of the world.

This is by far the most advanced user community site I know of (please tell me if you know of a more advanced system) and we're super excited about it.  We think it's going to improve our customer experience tremendously and allow us to accelerate the pace of improvements at Axosoft.

How we Built it:

Nothing like the Axosoft Community Site exists off the shelf, but many of the components do.  So here's how we did it:  First, we started with Telligent's Community Server to combine our existing user forums and blogs.  Prior to this launch, we used InstantASP's InstantForums and for blogs, we used .TEXT V0.95.  So transferring the data to the new Community Server product was in itself a huge challenge.  After that was done, we brought in our own OnTime Customer Portal, a web product that combines bug reporting, feature request and support incident tracking systems and fully integrates it into our own installation of OnTime 2007 that we use internally to manage all projects.  This is the first time we're using the OnTime Customer Portal and as first-time end-users, we immediately saw that there were some features that would make this product better than ever before (like external auth and easier integration into existing sites - these new Customer Portal features will be released in OnTime V7.0.2).  Then we combined the authentication systems of our old forums, the blogging system, the Axosoft Online Store and the OnTime Customer Portal into a single master authentication system.  The ruling party is a universal "Axosoft Account" that gives you access to everything Axosoft related.  So now when you sign into the Axosoft Community site, you're also signed into the Axosoft Store where you can manage your account or any hosted installations of OnTime and you can report a new support incident or post a new blog to your blog (if you have an Axosoft Community blog).  A single user id and password gets you access to everything.

To add more participation from the OnTime Community, we're also opening up Axosoft Community Blogs to anyone who wants to blog about OnTime, Project Management, Software Testing or Software Development.  Staying on subject, but expanding the community to bring best practices about software development.

We hope you enjoy it.  We sure had a great time building it.